Who: The CharacterCecil Harvey - The protagonist of Final Fantasy IV. This
is his Dark Knight version.

Why: The
DecisionFinal
Fantasy II for Nintendo (originally Final Fantasy IV in Japan) had always been
one of my favorite Final Fantasy games. Cecil Harvey was my favorite character
in that game and when I saw the Cinematics in the Nintendo DS remake I had to
make the costume. The design was so striking and memorable.

What: The
ProcessThe
costume took about 8 months to create. I first began with a human form that
closely resembled me from a free software program called Make Human. Using the
best reference images I could find I modeled each piece of armor in 3DS Max
starting with low poly proxies and adding more level of details. I did not download files from a shareware
site or any other source.

Next
I printed the armor with my 3D printer. The material is ABS plastic. The
software divides the imported model into layers .007 if an inch thick and
prints the part one layer at a time. This costume was 64 prints and about 500
hours in print time.

The
raw prints are somewhat rough and you can see the layers of plastic. I coated
the parts with black abs glue found at any hardware store. This filled the gaps
and made the parts stronger. The glue was sanded down to give each part a
smooth finish. Then I primed, fixed spots, primed, sanded, painted and then
finally clear coat.

The
Eye on the sword, detailed accents and stripes were created in Photoshop and
printed out on water decal paper and then applied.

The
outer tan strapping was two pieces of Ultrasuede fused together (to add
thickness and get the nap even on both sides), cut into strips and the braided
together. The buckles they are attached to were also modeled and printed.

The
eyes were silver sun glass lenses with white see-through fabric over them. The
body suit was crafted by my mother and she also helped me with the interior
strapping that holds the armor together

The
costume took about 8 months to create. The most difficult part was figuring out
how to attach all the armor to themselves and to the body suit.

Where and When:
The DebutI
debuted the costume at NDK 2010. Most of my pictures are from Fanime 2011,
though.